Ed Bark

Last Week Tonight probably needs to towel off a bit and present a more relaxed half-hour next Sunday. The premiere outing nonetheless showed considerable ingenuity and a willingness to take on topics that haven’t already been parodied to death.

Erik Adams

If Last Week Tonight With John Oliver can keep shedding humorous light on international affairs and other stories that fall through the cable-news cracks, this show might make it to eight weeks and beyond.

Joanne Ostrow

Oliver is terrific at mining humor from the most popular topics of the day, that is, the idiocy of the media and politicians. He's funny when he's knocking our intelligence. But he's best when he sticks to a barrage of short bits, enhanced with clips or photographs, as in his first week's efforts.

Matt Zoller Seitz

There were several very strong bits, but the best was Oliver's rant about the U.S. media's disinterest in the Indian elections.... At this point, my main complaint about the show is that it's not an hour.

Mary McNamara

It was with the Indian coverage that he both shone (commenting on one candidate's use of holographic appearances, he said, "That’s not just how you get elected. That’s how religions get started") and set himself apart. If Oliver can do for international news what Stewart and Colbert have done on the domestic scene, well, the already-crowded Sunday night DVR queue just took on an extra half-hour.

Tom Gliatto

Tim Goodman

Even at a commercial-free 30 minutes, Last Week Tonight felt rushed and jam-packed with information, heightened by Oliver's tendency to get excited and/or yell. Those are all good traits (and, historically, pretty funny traits of his), but the entire concept might work better at an hour so he could at least breathe.

Hank Stuever

The first episode of Last Week Tonight (and, to be clear, it is only the first episode, with plenty of potential and room for improvement) demonstrated little in the way of innovating or improving on “The Daily Show’s” prevailing concept.